The 9:14?
I’m on a train heading for NYC from Vermont. A while ago when we pulled into the station at Hartford, CT a thought suddenly occurred to me. I looked at my iPhone map. Sure enough. This is the same train line that passed my childhood home in Kensington, CT. I mean literally right past it. Across the street was a row of houses and the train went right by those back yards. When I was 6 or 7 the sound of that train heading for New York Town would lull me to sleep. I remember it as well as I remember my mother’s embrace. it had such an impression on me I wrote a song about that train called the 9:14 some 35 years ago. A few minutes past Hartford is the Berlin depot and shortly thereafter I’m looking at a row of back yards, and passing in a flash is the 200 year old house I once lived in, a ghost of my past.I wondered: Was there a child now in that house mesmerized by the sound of this train I was riding in?
John Paul O'Connor 